Decentralization of health care delivery is an important issue in heath planning. Development of innovative delivery systems, such as "telemedicine" systems which use locally-based paramedical personnel to provide care under the remote supervision of a physician, should be analyzed with regard to the "proper" degree of decentralization in the service area; the same holds true for more tradiational health planning decisions, such as approval of clinic construction or expansion. Mathematical models have been developed to assist planners in determining the conditions favorable to decentralization but appear to have seen little use. It is suggested that these models possess structural defects in terms of their size, their use of ambiguously defined parameters, their narrow insistence on single-valued objective functions, their failure to account for supply-demand interactions and their limitation to strictly quantitative performance measures. The proposed research seeks to explore the potetial relevance of current or improved mathematical methods to decentralization issues identified in certificate of need procedures, to investigate the utility of simple anlytical models aimed at determining the "proper" degree of decentralization, to explore the application of new concepts such as "fuzzy set theory" to the valuation of decentralization schemes, and to determine the feasibility of evaluating telemedicin systems using "patient trajectories" as a process measure of the quality of care in a decentralized system. It is hoped that new planning methodologies will emerge which can impact on health planning practices.